Pathways to Nursing: A Guide to Library and Online Research in Nursing and Allied Health

Citation

Cullen, R. (2005), "Pathways to Nursing: A Guide to Library and Online Research in Nursing and Allied Health", The Electronic Library, Vol. 23 No. 3, pp. 369-370. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470510603778

In the past two decades, nursing education has moved into a research‐based culture, and nursing programmes world‐wide require students of nursing to identify and employ research‐based evidence to support practice. This has created a need for students of nursing and current nurse practitioners to make better use of the print and electronic information resources available to them, and has prompted the publication of a number of books on research in nursing. Among these there are few that deal with the issue of information literacy in the field of nursing studies, and attempt to teach the skills of information retrieval and information evaluation so critical to effective education and research.

This book would therefore seem to fill an important gap in the nursing literature, and in some ways it does so adequately, describing in some detail how to access nursing resources in a typical nursing library, and the services likely to be available in a specialist or public library. In Chapter 1 it describes the layout of a small library, and in Chapter 2 the card catalogue and classification systems likely to be encountered, as well as the online catalogue. Chapter 3, the Reference Collection, briefly describes in general terms what reference tools are and how to evaluate them, and names a few general dictionaries and encyclopedias, along with a few specialist nursing and allied health resources. Chapter 4 deals with “Periodicals and Indexes,” Chapter 5 “Electronic Resources and the Internet,” Chapter 6 outlines “The research paper – putting it all together”, and Chapter 7 (which is less than two pages) purports to provide an overview of the information retrieval process.

Tucker has written several other library guides, and even a guide to IT skills, and this book looks as though it re‐uses much of that material. It contains some pretty standard basic information about catalogues, classification systems, appropriate indexes for finding nursing and allied health‐related material, including a number of H.W. Wilson Company's products such as the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, Education Index, General Science Index, Humanities Index, as well as CINAHL (the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature) and Medline, although these are listed without much guidance as to which to choose for a specific purpose, or how to search effectively. (The URL for PubMed is given, but it was a surprise to see PubMed treated so cursorily, since this resource is extensively used by the nursing community, and users need considerable training to make effective use of it for this purpose.) But this complaint highlights the main problem with the work – it doesn't give the impression of having got to grips with the contemporary world of electronic information sources, and retrieval. The chapter on Electronic Resources and the Internet is less than adequate, and not well integrated with the rest of the material. Chapter 7, on the research process, pays little heed to the modern world of word processors, bibliographic systems, and down‐loading bibliographic records, and recommends the collection of bibliographic and research notes on a hand‐made, hand‐written, hand‐sorted card system. This section, along with several other sections of the book, looks though it belongs to a book compiled 25 years earlier and not revised since!

This is borne out by the tone of much of the book, which is at times patronising, and less than user‐friendly, advising “be courteous with the reference librarian's time, ” and “by all means use the service but do not abuse it.” These authors don't seem to have heard about marketing and customer relations! This is amply demonstrated in the note inside the front cover that advises that rather than gender‐neutral language “he” will be used throughout, on the grounds, “When all is said and done a book reads rather more smoothly the old‐fashioned way”. Well this book certainly reads the old‐fashioned way – but it is not a very readable or relevant way, and I would not recommend it to a library that could find any alternative. A set of library web pages focused on how to use the resources and services of the individual library backed up by in‐house library instruction and brochures would do a better job in most of the nursing libraries I know.